Mary Lou McDonald’s demand that Micheál Martin should meet her to discuss government formation ignores one very simple but basic fact – the Fianna Fáil leader received an enhanced mandate from the electorate on the specific pledge that he would not, under any circumstances, go into coalition with Sinn Féin.
The clear victors in the election were Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael who between them received 43 per cent of the vote on the basis that they would serve another term together. Both parties were absolutely clear about ruling out Sinn Féin as a potential coalition partner.
One finding of The Irish Times pre-election poll is worth repeating. Eighty-three per cent of Fianna Fáil voters wanted another coalition with Fine Gael; just 6 per cent of them favoured a deal with Sinn Féin. Martin is clearly in tune with his party’s voters.
Whatever way you examine it, the big losers in the election were Sinn Féin, despite the Trump-like rhetoric emanating from McDonald in the aftermath, loudly proclaiming that defeat was actually a victory and that the party is entitled to be part of the next government.
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The reality is that in terms of the popular vote Sinn Féin came third after Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The cold figures are worth spelling out again. The numbers voting for Sinn Féin dropped by 116,968 since February 2020 – a decline of 5.5 per cent, the worst performance by a main Opposition party since 1943.
That didn’t stop the media frenzy when McDonald arrived at the RDS count centre to be immediately surrounded by a hoard of camera crews and journalists eager to hear her take on the result. Flanked by Northern First Minister Michelle O’Neill, she proclaimed that her party had received a powerful mandate.
This was simply a smokescreen to obscure the fact that the party had fallen far short of the expectations generated by successive opinion polls which, up to last spring, indicated that Sinn Féin would be by far the biggest party in the 34th Dáil. In any case, even if Sinn Féin had come in first place in terms of seats, rather than second, the party would have had no automatic entitlement to enter government. There have been many occasions in the past when the biggest party did not get its hands on power.
Probably the most notable was in 1973 when Fianna Fáil won 46.2 per cent of the vote and 69 seats in the 144-member Dáil but was ejected from office by a combination of Fine Gael and Labour. With Fine Gael having 54 seats and Labour 19, the junior coalition party was entitled to four cabinet posts. Before the crucial meeting to discuss the allocation, Labour leader Brendan Corish was encouraged by his key adviser Brendan Halligan to demand five posts from the incoming taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave. He promised to do so, without much hope of succeeding.
When the two leaders met, Corish was about to issue his demand when Cosgrave pre-empted him, saying: “Five seats Brendan and you can have the Department of Finance but if you don’t take it yourself, we will have it.” From that moment the two leaders bonded and nothing that was thrown at them in the following very difficult years could prise them apart despite their wafer-thin majority of just one.
There is a lesson there for Martin and Simon Harris. They may have got on each other’s nerves during the election campaign but both must focus on the need to build a secure government that is capable of withstanding the inevitable storms of the next few years.
What now for Sinn Féin and Mary Lou McDonald?
They are starting off from a position of strength. The performance of the two government parties in the election was astonishing in light of the fact Fine Gael has been in power since 2011 and that since 2016 they have jointly run the country, firstly through a confidence-and-supply arrangement and then in a full coalition. Given the fate of incumbent governments around the democratic world over the past year, the ability of the two big coalition parties to come back with an improved mandate is striking. The polls during the campaign and the transfer pattern in the election showed voters understood what was on offer. This is why both parties need to take a leaf out of Cosgrave’s book in their approach to the formation of a new government.
At the start of the election campaign, one or two over-excitable Fine Gael TDs were talking about Harris staying in the Taoiseach’s office for a full term if the party had the most seats. Now that the opposite has happened, a small number of Fianna Fáil people are suggesting the reverse.
Martin and Harris have enough sense to work out an arrangement that reflects the fact that Fianna Fáil won most seats, while maintaining the cohesion that characterised their first term of office together. In a joint statement on Monday they struck the right note, emphasising the need for a stable government “underpinned by mutual respect and clear policy direction”. The country deserves no less.